Now Contact contact totals never the same

Now Contact contact totals never the same - 09/11/0701:00 AM

I'm having a problem where multiple clients will have different numbers of contacts in a category on the server. The program says that it is synced up, but the amount will vary usually somewhere in the +- 20 range.

First, how is this possible? If it's a server category, and it's synced, shouldn't everyone have the same amount of contacts in that category? Is there a way to force the clients and server to compare their databases?

Also, recently someone must have merged or deleted 200 contacts. One of the clients kept the offending 200 contacts, just in case. We want to get these 200 back onto the server. How do we figure out which 200? This seems to me to be almost the same issue as the first, just that we probably have a reason for the different amounts of contacts, as opposed to no discernible reason.

Re: Now Contact contact totals never the same - 09/12/0707:12 PM

Have you looked to see if everyone has personal contacts in the file,

My users keep personal contacts local and company contacts on the server.

Also we have one person who does all the admin on the database i.e. everyone has write privilages to a "Contact so be inserted" category and that is it, every couple of days the admin goes in and puts the contacts in the right categories.

Re: Now Contact contact totals never the same - 09/12/0709:20 PM

I kind of like that idea. That might have less problems.

But no, that's not really the situation. Each person might have personal contacts, but that is outside of the scope of the server categories. Here's the full description. We have three categories on the server, Shared, Key, and Invalid.

Both say Shared contacts up to date and seem to work fine. Like I will add a weird name, make sure both computers sync contacts, then look it up on the 2nd computer and that name will be there. Where are my missing contacts? I'm missing 216 or so contacts, or she has 216 too many. Is there a way to figure this out or force all of the computers to sync up? I don't use my copy of Now Contact much since I am the tech guy, so mine is probably the farthest off. Most people seem to be within +- 20 or so contacts most of the time.

Re: Now Contact contact totals never the same - 09/13/0711:59 AM

We had a similar problem about a year ago, and according to support sometimes contacts loose a "marker" that tells the server they've been updated or changed, or something like that. The solution was to start new, blank, contact files and connect them up to the servers. Since we only have public contacts, and make sure that everything is stored on the server (we don't use comments or private notes), it wasn't a big deal.

Before I did this, I did an export to text of everyone's contact file as a backup, and to check against the new information, just in case someone had contacts that hadn't properly synced to the server. I was able to re-import them. Turned out nobody had more contacts listed before they started a new file than they did after, and nobody complained about missing or incorrect info, so we left it at that. Had there been problems, my plan was to import the text files and use the merge duplicates feature to make sure no data was lost.

Re: Now Contact contact totals never the same - 09/14/0704:46 AM

Yeah, I've already done that a few times. It just keeps drifting. Seems like there should be an option in the program to compare each local database with the server's list, or that option should even run itself every day or week.

We have multiple locations, and people syncing from home sometimes, maybe that could have something to do with it? They're all just aiming at the static ip address though, so shouldn't really be any different.

Thanks for your suggestion though. If it only went out of whack every year or so, I'd probably just accept that method. I'm hoping there's something you can do to maybe force a compare.